Do you approach and treat your pursuit of strength as a skill? If there is one pet peeve of mine it’s the ability of people to walk through most every endeavor in their life without purpose, or intent. If you want results in life you MUST be intentional with your approach. You must go on the attack with a laser beam focus.

Approach Strength As A Skill

When it comes to you improving on any skill you’re going to have to put in the practice. However you don’t want to practice a skill just for the sake of practicing. If your practice of a skill is made up of bad habits then you can expect to become practiced at bad habits. If you expect to improve a skill then you must practice good habits. Practice alone won’t make you perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect!

When it comes to strength you must learn good habits. Good habits that are associated with you building strength demand that you learn how to effectively activate your muscles and to move with quality skill. If you’re limited in quality skill then you need to practice to improve your skill.

When it comes to you building strength you want to make sure that when you are practicing a certain strength skill that you’re practicing it with intention and knowledge behind it in order to improve it. One way you can improve a relative skill is to get into the habit of practicing it with greater frequency.

Approach Strength As A Skill: Greasing The Groove (GTG)

One tremendously effective method for you to practice a skill and to build strength and proficiency with that skill is by applying the greasing the groove method (GTG). I know what you’re thinking…so what is GTG?

As an example let’s say you’re struggling to improve your pull-up number. For the sake of argument let’s say that you give yourself a max effort test with pull-ups and your max effort number is 5 pull-ups before you completely fatigue and your arms feel like they’re going to separate from your body.

In this scenario in order to improve your pull-ups by applying the GTG you want to start out day one by practicing your pull-ups in the morning. However instead of practicing your max effort number of 5 reps roughly cut that number in half. I realize 5 is an odd number in this example, but let’s say you practice 3 pull-ups.

Perform just one set of 3 pull-ups and go on about your day. About mid-day practice another set of 3 pull-ups and then another set of 3 pull-ups late afternoon. In this example you’ve just practiced doing a total volume of 9 pull-ups throughout the course of the day and that is 4 more pull-ups than your max effort attempt.

The idea here is to continue this pattern most days of the week. After a week or so you’re going to start to notice that practicing 3 pull-ups is going to become easy which at this point you can increase your practice number to 4 or 5 pull-ups throughout the course of the day.

At this point you’ll be practicing close to, or at your max effort throughout the course of the day giving you a total working volume of 12 to 15 pull-ups.

If you continue this trend then within a couple of months you’re going to be able to double and be on your way to tripling your original max effort number of 5 pull-ups. This is the power of GTG and GTG is all about the practice of strength!

Approach Strength As A Skill: The Takeaway

At the end of the day if you expect to build strength you’ve got to treat it as a skill. You want to challenge your body by frequently creating tension and activating your muscles on a frequent basis to improve your muscle firing pattern for a given movement.

Do you approach your strength training as a skill?

What strength movement are you currently trying to improve?

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I'm a Certified Strength And Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and author. I have had over 17 years experience in MMA fitness, strength and conditoning, and athletic performance for most every sport. As an author and specialist I've written close to a million words on fitness and strength. I'm also a Muay Thai practictioner and enjoy helping others to reach their peak potential through fitness and performance.